Investigating the "Mould effect" | Steve Mould | TEDxNewcastle

thank you very much so I'm a science presenter I present science on stage and on TV so I'm always on the lookout for new ideas new experiments new demonstrations things that I can engage people with and it's always a really good feeling when you stumble upon something or you discover a thing and you just think yes I know this is gonna work I know that I can present this in front of an audience and it's gonna be brilliant and so I want to tell you about when that happened recently I came across something and I thought this is gonna be absolutely great but only if I can solve one big problem with it and so that's the story I'm going to tell you but I'll give you some background first I I studied physics at University and at the same time I started doing stand-up comedy and and that was kind of you know it's fun and everything and stressful and hard the stand-up not the physics and when I graduated I I got a job in technology and I carried on doing stand-up comedy on the side and that was fine you know I was doing okay at stand-up comedy and and the technology job was fine but I kind of I missed the science I missed the physics and all that sort of stuff and so one day I decided to see if I could combine science with stand-up comedy and well okay so fast-forward that story to the present day and yes it is possible you can do it and I've just finished a tour with festival of the spoken nerds with Helen Arnie and Matt Parker which is our little comedy show that we do about science and and of course I wasn't the first person to have that idea a lot of people are doing it really well now but back then when I first started I kind of I was building shows for school kids and I was trying to persuade people that they should book me with my silly sort of comedy show about science and I got a few gigs under my belt or I got a phone call from someone who said can you do a chemistry talk for some school kids for about a thousand school kids now the answer to that question is no I I cannot do a chemistry talk because I didn't study chemistry I don't have a chemistry lab you know I can't get access to liquid nitrogen and all that cool stuff and I said it I told them I said yes I can do it of course I can do a chemistry talk because you know fake it till you make it right and and um and also like though there were some really big names on the bill and I thought you know I can't say no to that I've got to be on the same bill as these people this is brilliant so I said yes I think you know I work out the details later and and so I did I had this brainwave I thought I'll do it a talk about polymer chemistry because polymer using polymers are really interesting with pollens it's basically like plastic and rubber and that sort of thing the kind of things even a physicist can get hold off so that was my talking is gonna be a polymers and this is where I was I'm putting this show together but I discovered a brilliant demonstration but that was brilliantly problematic um one of the my favorite polymers that I discovered when I was putting this talk together is sodium no sorry polyethylene oxide polyethylene oxide is a brilliant example of a polymer because it's an incredibly long molecule and this is the thing about polymers they're just really really really long molecules and polyethylene oxide in particular is incredibly long it's so long that it has this amazing property of being very viscous but also elastic at the same time and it means you can do this really interesting thing with it if you try to pour polyethylene oxide you only have to start pouring it and it will continue to pour on its own if you see if I can write this word this is a bit more full than I maybe should have made it don't worry that's kind of weird isn't it just keeps going okay there's still a bit left on let me try again that's pretty freaky isn't it there's no amazing so it's a self siphoning liquid I discovered that laughs Wow self siphoning liquid that's awesome now that's not the demonstration that had the problem the demonstration that had the problem was the one that I used to explain what was going on in that one because I had this wonderful demonstration but I wanted some way for the audience to be able to visualize what was going on at the molecular level and I saw a brilliant demonstration it was steve Spangler he had some Mardi Gras beads you know this sort of plastic beads a chain of beads and he filled a pot with these plastic beads and amazingly if you start to pour the beads the beads will self siphon just like polyethylene oxide so I thought okay this is great I'll use that as my kind of model of what a polymer is like I thought you know I'm not gonna use plastic beads I'm gonna get some metal beads because they're shiny and that'd be nice so it decides to buy some metal beads and I bought 50 meters of metal bead chain like this there are about 8,000 individual beads one long chain like this and sure enough its self siphons so if I start to pour this thing it will keep going but it also does something very strange that the plastic beads don't do and I'll show you it now the chain rises above what so I'm definitely going to show them there but there's a problem and the problem is I have absolutely no idea why it happens and the things like explaining things is my job right so if I can't explain something that's really bad so that I need to work this out I have to find out why it goes up before it goes down and I asked around has anyone seen this before no one had seen it before and I tried to do some equations and when questions were terrible it just it didn't work so I had an idea I decided to make a youtube video because I thought if enough people see this then eventually I will receive an eloquent explanation in the comments it turns out I've really misunderstood YouTube but but no but I I learned a lot I learned that my experiment is fake and gay so YouTube comments they're just wonderful but I see that the the the the YouTube video was viewed now it's been a 1 and a half million views which I'm very proud of and it was discussed on a website called reddit yeah of course everyone's favorite website I'll show you now I don't if I can have a look so this is this is the the discussion on ask science subreddit just a brief discussion there oh all right and I followed the chain right and I followed the discussion but I don't think they got to the bottom of it so I made another decision I thought right what I'm going to do I'll film it in slow motion because then I'll be able to pour over the footage and I'll be able to work out exactly what's going on so I asked around does anyone have a slow motion camera and this company got in touch earth unplugs come and deal with us so ladies and gentlemen I can present to you in slow motion beads coming out of a pot Yeah right not wonderful and so and now it's going backwards what not really I'm just looping it but anyway also look we've managed to catch this beautiful thing this kind of like corkscrew shape just frozen in space so even though the chain is moving the corkscrew is staying where it is wonderful and so I poured over this footage and eventually I worked out the slow-motion video doesn't help but this that video was viewed a two and a half million times and eventually it came to the attention of some academics in Cambridge and they decided to write a paper about it so understanding the chain fountain buy begins and Warner fantastic in the in the Proceedings of the Royal Society a and look at that they go shorter than the discussion on reddit and looking in the references there's me fantastic there their explanation is really cool and I'll see if I can explain it to you they're this sort of insight was to think about the flexibility of the chain right there the chain is very flexible but if you try and flex it beyond a certain point it becomes rigid it becomes you know you can't bend it beyond a certain point so it's flexible and then it becomes rigid beyond a certain point and they looked at the mathematics of that and they saw that it was very hard so they ignored that and looked at something a lot easier which is that's how you do physics by the way if it's too hard imagine something easier and so they imagined like a simplified version of this that they imagined you've got a chain that's got rigid sections joined by flexible links so rigid flex will rigid flexible rigid flexible basically a chain of rods like this so we've already got a bit of the chain that's in motion this is being pulled up by some more chain up here this bit of rod here is about to be pulled into motion so we can look at the forces involved in weakens see that this rod here is about to be pulled from that end like that but the center of mass of the rod is there which means that when the rod finally moves upwards it doesn't just rise but it rotates as well meaning that a part of the rod ends up lower than where it was before but that can't happen because the rod is resting on something there's the pile of chain underneath it or there's the bottom of the pot it can't move downwards so instead it pushes against what is beneath it and it feels an equal and opposite reaction force pushing upwards like that so begins and Warners bizarre conclusion is that the reason the chain rises above the pot is because it's pushed by that pot a fantastic discovery and and and you know this this explanation I kind of that I stole it from the video that they made they made a video called understanding the chain fountain to accompany the paper if you search for on YouTube I recommend you watch the whole thing it's brilliant includes this explanation and I do want to play a clip of the video for you this is Mark Warner talking about the product talking about the project we wanted to see whether or not we could blend this research project because nobody understood the mold effect with the problems of the children now just play that again because nobody understood the mold effect I mean look I don't think even Einstein has an effect you know it's good for me because I always used to worry like if I have kids you know it's gonna be tough like it's school like it's hard having a surname like mold you know but now I mean it's given up what mold as in the mold effect fantastic um this is a very good theory for why the chain rises above the pot and what I mean by good theory is that it is testable it makes predictions that are potentially falsifiable and that's a good marker for a theory and one of the predictions that their theory makes is that the higher the chain the further the chain has to drop the higher the fountain will rise so this is Biggins now standing at the top of a staircase at the Royal Society they do really good stuff but Rutherford - physics dogs at UK where basically they're using things like this to inspire kids to look at real physical problems in the world and and do proper physics about actual things so check out the work that they do there that's kind of the end of the story you know it started with this thing that I accidentally discovered and then via YouTube and slow motion camera and these academics and chemistry finally we have an answer which is amazing for me except you know what can I add now you know so other things ahead why all the bad when I've run out bye dear Oh [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 232,729

Rating: 4.9546742 out of 5

Keywords: tedx talks, Science (hard), United Kingdom, ted talks, ted x, Performance, Chemistry, TEDxTalks, ted talk, Physics, English, tedx talk, ted, tedx

Id: wmFi1xhz9OQ

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 03 2014